Me, like most people I assume, got to know Worm through the duo of Gloomlord and Foreverglade, at a time when 20 Bucks Spin was at the forefront of a larger OSDM movement in the metal underground. It was definitely a very fruitful time to be a death metal fan, and I can't believe I already have to look at that period through a historical hindsight lens. A lot of that wave also included death metal that leaned a lot into doom metal, causing a lot of "death doom" vs "doom death" confusion, having iyts most dissonant counterpart coining the term "cavernous death metal", and Worm was one of the bands who leaned the most towards doom, pushing deep into funeral doom. So with this being the lasting impression that Worm left us with, it's a bit baffling returning five years later and seeing that Foreverglade's follow-up is a completely different style. And I don't mean like even a genre shift towards something adjacent, like full on doom or melodic death metal. No, Necropalace is a symphonic black metal album!
Now if this is a genre shift that feels out of place, that's partly because of how strong of an impression Gloomlord and Foreverglade left that it caused tunnel vision and a lack of paying a modicum of attention. See, Gloomlord isn't Worm's first album, nor is Foreverglade their only release in five years. The band actually started out as a very straight-forward black metal band, down to the aesthetics and raw sound, from demos like Nights In Hell to their actual full length debut Evocation Of The Black Marsh. And while there was a black metal element to Worm even in their two aforementioned notorious doom death albums, the mix between the two felt even stronger in the Starpath split they did with Dream Unending. But even with a black metal history, the jump to symphonic metal would feel quite drastic were it not for the fact that they also released the Bluenothing EP, where the first two songs dived even further down funeral doom, but the last two tracks shifted things towards dungeon synth and... you guessed it! Symphonic black metal!
The very surface level seeds for this genre shift dealt with, how does Worm fare when committing to the sound for a full album? Well, what makes this jump feel not as stark of a change is that Worm already had a knack for the atmospheric side of things, especially in the funeral doom leanings. There are elements to their sound that act as an even stronger glue than the surface level approach, from how their use of synths and soaring guitar solos does feel like shared DNA. Even with a new symphonic black metal approach, there are traces of a doomier gloom that harkens back to the doom death sound, albeit with a completely different flair.
There's a lot about Necropalace that makes it quite campy, and I already talked about the keys and the guitar solos acting as a bridge, but here they're pushed further to the forefront in order to make the album thrive on the mix of spookiness and melody. As far as the latter is concert, the guitar playing on this record does take center stage more often than a lot of albums of its type (happens when First Fragment's Phil Allaire-Tougas is your guitarist), which might be Necropalace's most unique selling point, especially when the album's longest songs also has Marty Friedman shredding along. With all but one intro song being hefty songs in runtime, the Disembowelment-isms do show up in tracks like "Halls of Weeping" bringing the pace down to a dirge-like doom, though still mixed with some of that orchestral camp for some gothic melodrama.
There's a reason why the Bandcamp description calls this album "rendered in blood-stained technicolor". There's something about this album's whole aesthetic and genre shift history and all the promo pics that came along with it that makes it feel almost like the idea of it is as important to the album as its music. And the music is great, and I would've loved it just the same if this had been Worm's schtick all along, but I probably wouldn't be as specifically enamored by it.
